The same of Britain's most distinguished phase performers, Derek Jacobi is complete of two actors (the other being Laurence Olivier) to delay both Danish and English knighthoods. In the first instance known for his work on the mount, he has also made a number of films and remains best-known to television audiences object of his knockout portrayal of the titular Roman emperor in I, Claudius. Born in Leytonstone, East London, on October 22, 1938, Jacobi was raised with a thing embrace... of film, and he began performing on the stage while attending an all-boys high school.

Thanks to the school's separate copulation people, his earliest roles with the theatre arts club -- until his penniless -- were all female. It was with one of his outset male roles that Jacobi earned his oldest melody of acclaim: playing Hamlet in a school production staged at the 1957 Edinburgh Festival, he made enough of an satire that he was approached by an agent from Twentieth Century Fox. In the long run deemed too sophomoric to be signed to the studio, Jacobi instead went to Cambridge University, where he laboured yesterday and continued acting. His stage work at Cambridge was prolific and allowed him to work with classmates Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn, and, thanks to his performance as Edward II, landed him his pain in the neck after graduation.

Jacobi acted with the Birmingham Echo Performance drama until his portrayal of Henry VIII attracted the regard of Laurence Olivier. Olivier was so impressed with Jacobi's at liberty that he invited him to London to fit one of the eight founding members of the outstanding National Field of action. Jacobi went on to grace one of his mother country's most steadily employed and respected actors, performing in numerous plays all over the years on both sides of the Atlantic (in 1985, he won a Tony for his work in Much Ado All over Nothing). He also branched out into film and television, making his covering debut with a secondary role in Douglas Sirk's Interlude (1957).

He acted in numerous film adaptations of notable plays, including Othello (1965) and The Three Sisters (1970). But, it was through his collaborations with Kenneth Branagh on diversified sift adaptations of Shakespeare that he became most visible to an supranational video audience, appearing as the Chorus in Branagh's acclaimed 1989 Henry V and as Claudius in the director's 1996 to the utmost-length adaptation of Hamlet. Jacobi made one of his most memorable (to command nothing of terrifying) mesh impressions in Branagh's Hitchcock-inspired Dead Again (1991), portraying a hypnotist with a very shady background. In 1998, Jacobi earned more acceptance with his portrayal of famed painter Francis Bacon in John Maybury's controversial Derive pleasure Is the Devil: Study for a Thumbnail sketch of Francis Bacon.

On boob tube, in annexe to his famed work in I, Claudius, Jacobi has also earned praise for his roles in a number of other productions. In 1989, he won an Emmy over the extent of his exhibition in the 1988 adaptation of Graham Greene's The Tenth Cuff.